Welcome to the portfolio, Lazard

If you’ve been following my blog for the past few weeks, that sentence should make perfect sense. If not, well, why the heck aren’t you reading my stuff?

Just kidding. It’s OK. I’ll fill you in. It relates to my Cycle Method, which I’ve been using to steadily grow my portfolio. When I say I hit a triple, I mean I increased my portfolio’s value in three different ways. The goal is to hit a single (one increase), double (two increases), triple and home run (four increases) each week for a cycle. Get it?

Today, my account got a boost from some capital gains. Not that I had anything to do with the gains, but I’ll certainly take them. I also made a $50 deposit and, overall, my portfolio grew by $112.92.

Now, the third way I added to my portfolio didn’t result in any immediate gains. It didn’t help my portfolio grow today … but it will in the future. Thanks to its $1.64 annualized dividend, the one share of Lazard (LAZ) I scooped up for $45.77 will give my account little jolts of dividend income I’ll be able to reinvest for the foreseeable future. It pays $0.41 quarterly in Feb., May, Aug. and Nov.

Lazard Ltd. is a financial advisory and asset management firm. Its clients include corporations, institutions, individuals and even governments. Wouldn’t it be cool to call a country’s government a client? If an entire government trusts Lazard with its money, I figure I can take a chance on picking up a share here and there.

It checks most of the boxes for me as I’m a fan of its yield (3.58%) and payout ratio (48.2%). It’s also been raising its dividend for the past six years and has paid a special dividend of $1.20 a share each of the past two.